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We still use inkblots to test sanity?

By Sarah BarmakSpecial to the Star

Sat., Aug. 1, 2009

It's a duck in a limousine. It's two bats making out. It's a Tibetan monk high-fiving a friend.

When you stare at the amorphous inkblots developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, the rule is that you don't see what's on the paper, but what's inside your head. Like the illusory pageant produced by windblown clouds on a sunny day, the iconic inkblot is a mirror that reflects what you are.

This is an example of a Rorschach ink blot. The common answer to this plate is blue: crab, lobster and spider. (HANDOUT PHOTO)

That's the theory, in any case. But leave it to the guys at Wikipedia to throw it all into doubt. By insisting on displaying the 10 original Rorschach blots – together with the most frequent patient responses to each – on the free, user-generated encyclopedia last month, Wikipedia users have set off a storm of criticism from mental health professionals worried the "normal" answers (moths, bats, people) will allow their craftier wards to cheat the game. (This although the material has been publically available elsewhere for decades.)

"You can see it as having the answers to the GRE out there," says Gregory J. Meyer, associate professor of psychology at the University of Toledo, who has spent much of his career researching the Rorschach. All this is more than a little confusing. How can there be correct responses to a test that, by definition, has no right answers?

Even more concerning to some, why are the 10 inkblot plates, designed by Dr. Rorschach in 1921, still one of the most common tools millions of psychologists use to get inside our heads? These things are 90 years old – the same age as such bygone mental health relics as penis envy, smelling salts and phrenology.

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"Apparently, mind-doctors are still using the Rorschach test to diagnose the vapors, hysteria, and brain disequilibrium in their patients," quipped one blogger on media news site Gawker, who joked that the test was "Victorian." To its harshest critics, however, the test is a serious problem – evidence that psychology is avoiding much-needed housecleaning, refusing to turn its back on outdated, and perhaps even harmful, methods.

Yet although it was based on a 19th-century inkblot parlour game called Blotto or Klecksographie, the Rorschach test has flourished, weathering decades of criticism to become a cultural touchstone.

From Andy Warhol paintings to comic books to rock music, the humble blot has become a leitmotif, reminding us of the mysteriousness of our own minds – and the limits of interpretation.

Psychologists characterize the test as a visual problem-solving exercise that tests not only a patient's secret ideas – the "content" of what they see – but the way they see, too. Disorganized answers can point doctors to formal thought disorders.

"As an unstructured task, it requires people to form a narrative about what they're seeing and why they're seeing it," Meyer explains. "It becomes a ripe opportunity to observe that disorganization in thought processes."

Psychologists who worry patients will now work to outsmart the Rorschach must have been chilled by a scene in this year's DC Comics blockbuster, Watchmen. In it, a psychiatrist attempts to use the inkblot test on a captured masked vigilante also named Rorschach, who wears an inkblot mask. For him, the blot is a metaphor for a dangerous relativism. "Existence is random, has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long," he tells his psychiatrist.

When his doctor asks what he sees in one inkblot, he calmly lies. "A pretty butterfly," he says – although the blot really reminds him of his very first victim.

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"There have been occasions where people have done that," says Meyer. Further, patients who don't consciously lie can still withhold things.

"There is a filtering process," he says. "People see many, many more things than they actually articulate. It's not like doing a blood test, where if the person doesn't want to do it, it still gets done."

In 2000, a landmark study published by psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, James Wood and Howard Garb claimed that the test was riddled with problems, ranging from the charge that practitioners often disagree about how to weigh different scores to its alleged inability to detect depression and suicidal thoughts to the accusation that non-white subjects tend to score abnormally.

The massive study came and went – and exactly nothing changed. New studies – some conducted by Meyer – have since contradicted its most damning findings and, although most psychologists admit it has limits, the test remains widely in use. The issue has split the profession.

Meanwhile, the Rorschach has endured. In popular culture, it is a metaphor for ambiguity, for things whose significance is in the eye of the beholder.

According to art critic Mia Fineman, it is the blots' democratic quality that fascinates us – they are what we want them to be.

It was that quality that attracted Andy Warhol, who used Rorschach's paint-and-fold method to make a series of multi-coloured inkblot paintings in 1984.

In Warhol's hands, the blots became flattened, filigreed, almost decorative.

"I was trying to do these to actually read into them and write about them, but I never really had the time to do that," Warhol said in a 1986 interview with Robert Nickas in Arts Magazine. "So I was going to hire somebody to read into them, to pretend it was me, so that they'd be a little more ... interesting."

Today, the Rorschach is being repurposed in surprising ways. A team from Microsoft has developed a way of using computer-generated Rorschach blots to engineer more foolproof passwords. Users view a series of 10 random inkblots and construct a complex password based on what they sees in the blots – one that, cryptographers hope, is theoretically unguessable, unlike a birthday or pet's name. And because the password is so personal, it should also be hard to forget. The program is still in the testing stages, but it's free to try at www.inkblotpassword.com.

Meyer emphasizes that the tests should be used in concert with other methods, including talking with patients about what they're feeling.

And he isn't worried about Wikipedia.

"Casual exposure to the blots doesn't change that ... people see different things," he says. "They might be able to say, `Oh yeah, I can see that (butterfly), but me, I really see this.' What they see in the inkblots, that does not change."

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